Michael Prescott - Riptide

A postcard followed the letter. Though it had been lost, a photo of it, taken by police at the time, remained extant and was reproduced in the book. The card had been written quickly, with none of the panache of the first letter, but the writing seemed to match that of the Dear Boss letter and the less disciplined diary passages.

She kept turning pages until she found the cover note from the package with the kidney. This one was written in a frenetic scrawl. The diarist had implied he was drunk when he composed it. The ragged scribbles matched the wildest entries in the diary, the ones showing the greatest decay of self-control.

In the days after mailing his ominous parcel, his condition worsened.

Go out nightly. Roam the streets. Constables everywhere. No opportunities. My head rarely clear. Thoughts run like a millrace. Too much gin and ale. Insufficient nourishment. Wasting away. Must put myself together. Scarcely recognise myself in the cheval-glass. Even Vole remarked on it. Asked if I were ill. Smirked when he said it. They mock me. They don’t know who they are dealing with. I am more than any of them. I have thrown the city into a panic. Every policeman hunts me. Every whore imagines my fingers on her throat. Newsboys cry themselves hoarse on every footway seeking to slake the disgustful curiousity of the multitude.

His penmanship was wildly erratic now, many of the words barely legible. He was breaking down-breaking apart.

This night will bring a great new victory. I sense it. As if with psychical powers I foresee the future.

Oceans of blood.

A blank page followed, as if to mark the momentous event. On the next page there was just one line of small, neat, careful script.

Done. It is done. Can not write of it this morning. There are no words…

The Ripper’s fifth victim was Mary Kelly. Photos had been taken of the crime scene, grainy black-and-white images of appalling slaughter. The woman had been torn to pieces in her bed.

Her pretty face-now no face at all. In the dance of the fireglow from the hearth I obliterated her. She did scream once. ‘Murder’ she cried. I feared someone would come. But this was Miller’s-court. The inhabitants are animals. They cowered in their dens.

What he’d said about the victim was accurate. Her face had been eradicated.

Two days have passed.

I partake of food again. I shun the bottle.

My frenzy has passed like a summer storm and I am whole and healed. No longer do I explore the nocturnal streets.

The last one has left me sated though not forever. I am like unto a man who has downed a great feast and imagines he will never know hunger again. But the pangs will come. When they do, I will answer them.

The savage strokes of his pen, mimicking the strokes of his knife, had given way to the meticulous copperplate of the early entries. But when he wrote again, much time must have passed. Some of the old unsteadiness was back, the forward slant, the heavy underlining.

I fear the city has forgotten me. To-night they will have a reminder.

I did kill one but there was no satisfaction in it. She was a haggard thing with a tobacco stench and a raucous laugh. Foul. To kill her was a mercy but it was not the same.

Alice McKenzie, “Clay Pipe” Alice, was killed on July 17, 1889. The murder wasn’t generally attributed to the Ripper, because there was only superficial mutilation of the abdomen. But the relative absence of postmortem violence could have reflected the killer’s lack of commitment.

Possibly I have lost the taste for it. I forbear to think so. I would not want my best days to lie behind me.

The last two passages were written listlessly, the words lightly rendered, t ’s left uncrossed and i ’s undotted. The next entry was neat and controlled.

It has been so long. I hardly think I will prowl again. I have settled into a comfortable schedule. I am fit and self-possessed. I look back on the autumn of ’88 and that one other night and I think it was a spell of madness. Yet I regret none of it. On those nights I breathed fire. I outstared the basilisk. I lived.

Not again, perhaps. Never again.

I am thinking I shall burn this book.

It is a new year and I feel something growing in me. The old familiar urge. I had thought it was gone for good. But there may be life in me yet. Life for me, death for others.

Last night I again walked the streets of the East End. Little has changed. Little ever changes there.

I saw few policemen.

Many whores.

From the transition to shorter sentences and more jagged script, she knew what would come next.

Under the railway arch I took her-glorious-I was wrong to think I ever had lost my spirit-the knife felt so right in my hand, a part of me-the first incision like a lover’s kiss-the hot stink of her, the charnel-house reek-

But I left it uncompleted. Left her dead but mostly intact. Sheer bad luck, a constable coming by. I heard the clop of his boots and ran. He found her moments later. It was a near thing.

But glorious.

This had to be Frances Coles, dead on February 13, 1891. The day before Valentine’s Day.

Some say too much time has passed. They say this is the work of some other fiend.

Let them prattle. The next one will bear my signature.

I see now that I can never return to what I was. One spark animates me. One engine moves me. I can not deny my deepest nature. I must do what I am called to do. I am a sleepwalker otherwise. I am awake only on nights like these. To desist is to die.

Never again will I be less than what I am.

And shortly it will be Kitty who feels my knife. Her time has come. I will do her as I did the one in Miller's-court.

But the timeline listed no more victims. The killer’s plans must have changed. Jennifer turned the page and saw why.

Disaster. How could they know? I made no mistakes, not one.

They don’t know. If they did I should have been arrested by now. They are only sniffing round. I am patient. I can wait them out.

And now I see. It was Vole. Dull Vole, sleepy Vole, smirking Vole. He slipped out of his bedchamber and went carousing in the city. He saw me there on the night of the whore’s death. He saw me and he talked, not to the police but to his stupid chattering friends who contacted the authorities.

And so they came by to speak with me. And they continue coming by.

Wisp has put me on leave. The noose tightens.

How much did Vole see? How much has he told?

They shadow me. Two inspectors. They dog my footsteps. But I will outmanoeuvre them. I have packed my essentials in a trunk small enough to carry by hand.

I will consign this memoir to the fire. Then slip away in the night, when my watchers have dropped their guard. Book passage on a steamer under an assumed name. America is a large country, large enough to get lost in. Once there I will cover my trail, change identities again. They’ll not find me.

And Kitty, dear Kitty, must wait. But not forever. I shall come back for her.

That was the final entry. Obviously, he had been unable to destroy the precious record of his crimes. Perhaps it was then that the name on the inside cover was blacked out, the early pages removed, to preserve some degree of anonymity. The diary would have gone into the trunk, to be carried across the Atlantic. And farther west, all the way to California, to this house. The House of Silence, which had kept the secret all these years.